Study: The War That Was Based on Lies Has Killed 655,000 Iraqis

Women wait outside a hospital while their relatives receive treatment from Monday night's car bomb attack in Baghdad October 10, 2006. At least 13 people were killed and 46 wounded when a car bomb exploded in a busy market in northeast Baghdad on Monday, police said. (REUTERS/Kareem Raheem)

The mother, center, of seventeen-year-old Abdur Rahman wails over his coffin outside Yarmouk hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday Oct. 10, 2006. Rahman was killed together with his friend by unknown gunmen as he was helping a women move out of Baghdad's Dora neighborhood. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)

A teenage boy hugs the coffin of his father Faisal Murtada outside a hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2006. Murtada, a handyman, was killed with two of his colleagues by unknown gunmen. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
From the New York Times:

A team of American and Iraqi public health researchers has estimated that 600,000 civilians have died in violence across Iraq since the 2003 American invasion, the highest estimate ever for the toll of the war here.

The figure breaks down to about 15,000 violent deaths a month, a number that is quadruple the one for July given by Iraqi government hospitals and the morgue in Baghdad and published last month in a United Nations report in Iraq. That month was the highest for Iraqi civilian deaths since the American invasion.

But it is an estimate and not a precise count, and researchers acknowledged a margin of error that ranged from 426,369 to 793,663 deaths.

It is the second study by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It uses samples of casualties from Iraqi households to extrapolate an overall figure of 601,027 Iraqis dead from violence between March 2003 and July 2006.

The findings of the previous study, published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, in 2004, had been criticized as high, in part because of its relatively narrow sampling of about 1,000 families, and because it carried a large margin of error.

The new study is more representative, its researchers said, and the sampling is broader: it surveyed 1,849 Iraqi families in 47 different neighborhoods across Iraq. The selection of geographical areas in 18 regions across Iraq was based on population size, not on the level of violence, they said.